Powerful computing can predict what farmers will soon need

Feb. 20, 2014

Lettuce sprouts in a field near Salinas in this file photo. / The Salinas Californian

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On a Monday morning a Salinas farmer pulls on his boots and trudges out to the kitchen to pour coffee while he fires up his laptop to listen. “On Friday you will need to apply 58.5 kilograms of phosphate-nitrogen mix at coordinates 41° 24' 12.1674", 2° 10' 26.508 before 3 p.m. to avoid a wind speed above 15 knots.”

“Good morning to you, too,” he mumbles as he pulls out the printout and walks outside to hand it to his field manager.

While this scenario is fictional, the technology behind it is not. It’s here today and growers in the Salinas Valley are watching closely.

On Tuesday, Rebecca Costa, a best-selling author of “The Watchman’s Rattle,” spoke to The Californian about her latest book, “The Verge,” before she spoke at the Salinas Rotary Club. The book tackles the bold new world of computer analytics — crunching zeros and ones much like the left side of our brains processes information to reach a decision. But it goes even further. Technology exists today that can predict future outcomes based on existing data.

Luis Alvarez, president of the Alvarez Technology Group in Salinas, calls this emerging field “big data.” The amounts of data needed for such efforts is mind boggling. Right when we were getting used to our smart phones having the ability to store a gigabyte, or 1 million bytes of information, along came the terabyte, or 1 trillion bytes of data. It requires 10 bytes to form the data equivalent of an average English word.

But for this new world, usher in what companies like IBM and Google already have: a new unit of data storage called a petabyte, or 1 million trillion bytes of information. Google manages server farms with 20 petabyte storage capabilities, or 20 million trillion bytes of data. To put that into context, just 2 petabytes is enough to contain every written word in every academic research library in the country.

As weird as it sounds, big data can be a game changer for, say, a Salinas broccoli farmer. And growers here and at companies such as IBM, have seen the writing on the wall. Without naming names, Alvarez noted that IBM is already talking to certain Salinas Valley growers about what the technology behemoth can do for the agriculture industry using powerful big-data tools.

Ash Kanagat, IT director at Verizon Wireless, said in a recent video that when his company adopted InfoSphere Data Explorer it began gaining insights from its databases that it didn’t know it possessed.

“It helps you manage not only the data you know about, but it helps you manage data you don’t know about,” he said.

Powerful computer analytics have the ability to connect the dots of information stored on different servers that give growers a leg up in an industry where profit margins are measured in single digits.

To understand how this can be an immense new tool as well as a dangerous game-changer, consider how powerful analytics could affect politics. Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science and director of the Simulation & Optimization Lab at the University of Illinois, used a computer analytics model to predict correctly that President Barack Obama would win the 2012 presidential election. His model not only predicted the win, but accurately predicted the popular vote and the outcome of the electoral college, all based on a program that took huge amounts of data from polls all across America and connected the dots.

Alvarez posed a hypothetical question: What if a candidate for a seat on the Monterey County Board of Supervisors had access to that tool, ran the data and it predicted he or she could not win, and that candidate dropped out of the race?

In this case, the future was predicted — how accurately, no one would ever know — and perhaps more disturbingly, changed.

Dennis L. Taylor writes about agriculture and technology for The Salinas Californian. Follow him on Twitter @taylor_salnews.